Looking Through Taḥqīq Glasses: Early Modern Imagination and the Unveiling of Nature in Mīrzā Bīdil’s The Sinai of Knowledge

Abstract

In this article I trace the contours of the notion of taḥqīq in the Ṭūr-i maʿrifat “The Sinai of Knowledge,” a late seventeenth-century poetic exploration of natural phenomena by the most important Indo-Persian poet-philosopher of the Mughal times, Mīrzā ʿAbd al-Qādir Bīdil (ʿAẓīmābād, 1644 – Delhi, 1720). I collect and analyze all the textual loci where the term taḥqīq occurs in Bīdil’s mathnawī, showing how “verification/realization” is a key concept to make sense of Bīdil’s method of observation, via imagination, of the phenomenic unfolding of physis. I also explore several surprising points of contact between Bīdil’s poetic conceptualization of nature and some aspects of Renaissance and post-Renaissance Italian naturalistic thought.